Recently, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has significantly enhanced the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but Vision–Language Models (VLMs) still struggle with multi-step reasoning tasks due to limited multimodal reasoning data. To bridge this gap, researchers have explored methods to transfer CoT reasoning from LLMs to VLMs. However, existing approaches either need high training costs or require architectural alignment. In this paper, we use Linear Artificial Tomography (LAT) to empirically show that LLMs and VLMs share similar low-frequency latent representations of CoT reasoning despite architectural differences. Based on this insight, we propose L2V-CoT, a novel training-free latent intervention approach that transfers CoT reasoning from LLMs to VLMs. L2V-CoT extracts and resamples low-frequency CoT representations from LLMs in the frequency domain, enabling dimension matching and latent injection into VLMs during inference to enhance reasoning capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms training-free baselines and even surpasses supervised methods.

Object-centric learning aims to break down complex visual scenes into more manageable object representations, enhancing the understanding and reasoning abilities of machine learning systems toward the physical world. Recently, slot-based video models have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in segmenting and tracking objects, but they overlook the importance of the effective reasoning module. In the real world, reasoning and predictive abilities play a crucial role in human perception and object tracking; in particular, these abilities are closely related to human intuitive physics. Inspired by this, we designed a novel reasoning module called the Slot-based Time-Space Transformer with Memory buffer (STATM) to enhance the model's perception ability in complex scenes. The memory buffer primarily serves as storage for slot information from upstream modules, the Slot-based Time-Space Transformer makes predictions through slot-based spatiotemporal attention computations and fusion. Our experimental results on various datasets indicate that the STATM module can significantly enhance the capabilities of multiple state-of-the-art object-centric learning models for video. Moreover, as a predictive model, the STATM module also performs well in downstream prediction and Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks. We will release our codes and data at https://github.com/intell-sci-comput/STATM.

Understanding and reasoning about dynamics governed by physical laws through visual observation, akin to human capabilities in the real world, poses significant challenges. Currently, object-centric dynamic simulation methods, which emulate human behavior, have achieved notable progress but overlook two critical aspects: 1) the integration of physical knowledge into models. Humans gain physical insights by observing the world and apply this knowledge to accurately reason about various dynamic scenarios; 2) the validation of model adaptability across diverse scenarios. Real-world dynamics, especially those involving fluids and objects, demand models that not only capture object interactions but also simulate fluid flow characteristics. To address these gaps, we introduce SlotPi, a slot-based physics-informed object-centric reasoning model. SlotPi integrates a physical module based on Hamiltonian principles with a spatio-temporal prediction module for dynamic forecasting. Our experiments highlight the model's strengths in tasks such as prediction and Visual Question Answering (VQA) on benchmark and fluid datasets. Furthermore, we have created a real-world dataset encompassing object interactions, fluid dynamics, and fluid-object interactions, on which we validated our model's capabilities. The model's robust performance across all datasets underscores its strong adaptability, laying a foundation for developing more advanced world models.